What Tuesday’s elections mean for the future of abortion rights

Supporters of abortion rights have spent much of the last year trying to fight Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine access to the procedure. Now, Democrats’ commanding victories in the 2025 elections have breathed new life into the fight.

Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill’s respective gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey will shield abortion rights in two states that have become havens for people fleeing abortion bans. In Pennsylvania, voters decided to retain three liberal supreme court justices, maintaining Democratic control of a bench that could decide the future of abortion rights in the deeply purple state.

The sweeping support for California’s Proposition 50, a redistricting measure that will help Democrats pick up extra seats in the US House, will also likely defend national access to abortion. If Republicans are able to strengthen their grip on the US House and Senate in 2026, they may secure the votes they need to pass an abortion ban or extend legislation that has already left Planned Parenthood defunded for the next year.

In the three years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, unleashing a wave of state-level abortion bans, the fight over abortion rights has become one of the most important issues in US elections. Democrats’ unexpectedly strong showing in the 2022 midterms were largely attributed to outrage over Roe’s demise, while even voters in Republican strongholds repeatedly voted for ballot measures that protected access to the procedure.

Yet when Kamala Harris failed to win the White House in 2024, despite her campaign’s foregrounding of abortion rights, questions rose about whether the issue could still propel Democrats to victory. Recent polling has also suggested that, compared with 2024 and 2023, protecting access to abortion is no longer as important to voters.

Mikie Sherrill in East Brunswick, New Jersey, on Tuesday. Photograph: Jonathan Fernandes/UPI/Shutterstock

The elections in Virginia perhaps provided a most revealing glimpse into how voters are now thinking about abortion, as well as the future of the procedure. In a debate against Spanberger, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears accused Spanberger of supporting “abortion up until the very hour that the baby could be born, up until the very minute.

“You would have a baby aborted on the table,” claimed Earle-Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor.

Trump has also spent years making similar – and similarly baseless – claims about Democrats. Only about 1% of abortions take place at or after about 21 weeks of pregnancy, and no abortions take place at or after birth. That would be infanticide, which is already illegal across the US.

Although Spanberger – like many of the other Democrats who claimed victory on Tuesday night – primarily focused on affordability, her campaign also emphasized abortion. Of the $11m that her campaign spent on TV ads over the last year, $1.1m went towards ads that, in the last few weeks of the campaign, highlighted Earle-Sears’ views on abortion, CNN reported. While Earle-Sears tried to downplay her views on abortion during her campaign, she has repeatedly said that she personally opposes the procedure.

Advocacy groups also poured money into expanding awareness of abortion in the Virginia races. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for instance, spent about $1.8m in Virginia on voter education campaigns that predominantly focused on candidates’ stances on abortion.

Ultimately, Earle-Sears’ fear-mongering rhetoric on abortion did not appear to hold sway with Virginia voters: Spanberger won a decisive 57% of the vote, according to the most recent polling totals.

Democrats will now control the Virginia house, senate and governor’s mansion for the first time since Roe fell. They will likely be able to pass a constitutional amendment that would add abortion rights to the state constitution; although the amendment has already passed the state legislature once, it must pass twice in consecutive years before heading to voters.

If Virginia Democrats move forward with the constitutional amendment, abortion will almost certainly dominate the state’s politics in next year’s elections, too.

In a statement, Mini Timmaraju, president of the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, celebrated the fact that Virginia Democrats successfully expanded their majority in the state house.

“This sweep proves what we have seen again and again: when candidates run on expanding and protecting abortion access, they win,” Timmaraju said.